Democracy and Knowledge

Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens

by Josiah Ober

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008

Liberty was Born from Endless Meetings

This is an interesting look at how the democratic political institutions of
classical Athens worked. Ober wants to refute the idea that participatory
democracy is useless on any scale bigger than a kibbutz or a backwoods New
England village — that it either becomes hopelessly inefficient, or the
democratic forms lapse into mere formalities, with oligarchs ruling behind the
scenes. He claims instead that the Athenian political institutions should be
seen as devices for bringing together the dispersed relevant knowledge of the
citizenry, and for diffusing knowledge and skills among the citizens, in ways
that less democratic city-states could not match. "The history of Athenian
popular government shows that making good use of dispersed knowledge is the
original source of democracy's strength" (p. 2).

I will not go into details here — Ober has a
an well-written online
precis — but the core idea is this. A more authoritarian government
might be able to decide what it wants to do faster, and execute its plans with
less fuss, but how are the tiny set of rulers (who after all are no smarter
than the average bear, though probably more vicious) to figure out what to do?
The decisions of the demos draw on the knowledge and intelligence of
more minds than any king or tyrant and his cronies. The decisions of the demos
are also ones that persuade many minds of their desirability, rather
than matching the whims and prejudices of one man or small clique. (To quote
the words
Thucydides puts
in Pericles's mouth in the
famous funeral
oration, "instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way
of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at
all.") Athens, of course, had its share of disastrous blunders, but so has
every government ever, less democratic ancient states very much included. All
in all, I find Ober's argument rather persuasive, though my prejudices incline
me to want to think things like this are true. There were certainly places
where I wish he had gone into more detail about how, exactly, Athenian
institutions worked as mechanisms of collective cognition, but I suspect that
our sources just don't let us be that much more specific.

Ober has clearly spent a lot of time reading economics and organization
theory. In addition to doing unfortunate things to his prose style, this means
he thinks of problems in terms of transaction costs, aligning incentives, and
creating common knowledge (in the technical sense of game theory; more below).
This in turn means that he tends to imagine the problem of figuring out what
the polity should do as just one of bringing together existing pieces
of dispersed information. Transaction costs and the like are important, and so
is sharing what's already known. But,
as some democratic
theorists have pointed out, much of genuine problem-solving consists of
coming up with new ideas and new information, and devising new courses of
action. (I'm not thinking of changing the scheme of representation, just
exploring new options within it.) Neoclassical
economics, even its
neo-institutional branch, tends to assume that the
only obstacles to acting optimally are conflicting incentives, and
ignorance of specific material facts, and wishes away the sheer difficulty of
figuring out what the best or even an adequate course of action.

But for lots of problems, finding the optimum is intrinsically
hard. I think this sort of decision-making is especially hard for one person
or a small group to do, not just because they are throwing limited processing
power against problems of high intrinsic computational complexity, but also
because of certain foibles of human beings, like being attached to our ideas.
One of the potential strengths of participatory democracy is bringing many
minds to bear on improve existing ideas, as people who are not skilled
enough to come up with good ideas on their own can still see how to make them
better.
(The funeral
oration again: "we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot
originate". Karl Popper translated that sentence as "although only a few may
originate a policy, we are all able to judge it" [The Open Society and
Its Enemies, vol. I, ch. 10, p. 186 of the 5th edition], which is even
more to the point, but as I have no Greek I'm not sure how much of that is
Pericles and how much is Popper.) Indeed, one of the key points established
by Scott Page's work is that a diversity of
perspectives and heuristics is at least as important as expertise in
group problem solving, and that a sufficiently diverse group of the relatively
unskilled can out-perform even the best single expert, if the group can
communicate and cooperate — which, in light of the Athenian fondness for
using lotteries, is incredibly suggestive. Ober cites Scott's book, but
doesn't really engage with it, and more generally, he doesn't really consider
the possibility that the democratic process is itself a cognitive or
computational device, one capable of generating new knowledge and options, not
just picking from a fixed menu. I am not sure whether this blind-spot comes
from thinking economically (really, economistically) and
not computationally, or whether it comes
from taking as one's guides Hayek and Cass Sunstein, rather
than Dewey and Popper*;
but a blind-spot it is.

A case where the problem of figuring out what to do is particularly
difficult is that of designing new institutions, or modifying existing ones.
While people might be motivated to come up with institutions which will advance
their interests, selfish or shared, figuring out which institutions will do
that is not exactly trivial. Ober claims that Athenian institutions were
extremely well suited to promoting the survival and "collective flourishing" of
Athens, since all its citizens shared a strong common interest in doing so.
But Ober never really explains how the Athenians could figure out how
to act on that interest. He gestures at a selectionist explanation, pointing
out that it was not all that uncommon for a Greek city to be invaded and
sacked, with massive pillaging, death, and enslavement as the consequences.
This seems to me to be far too weak. Ober (pp. 80--82) estimates that, between
800 and 300 BC, somewhere between 12 and 33 percent of the Greek cities
suffered this level of destruction. (The high figure comes from the most
prominent and best-attested cities.) But even the high estimate is simply too
little selection, too infrequently, to create very complex adaptations**.

Leaving aside that quantitative difficulty, this is gliding over the fact
that people perceive themselves to have different interests —
whenever there are gains from cooperation, there is a struggle over how to
divide them — and conflicting interests shape institutions. This was
surely true even among the free male citizens of classical Athens, something
Ober systematically neglects, except for some remarks about how elites came to
reconcile themselves to the democracy. (He treats
the tyranny of the
thirty as an embarrassing aberration.) Again: one of the virtues of
democracy is that it provides a way other than violent conflict for
making such bargains. Even the messy compromises needed to get majority
support mean that many interests must be satisfied by policy, a
tendency which only gets stronger as the set of those with a voice in democracy
grows more diverse.

A second dubious legacy from economics is an attempt to show that Athenian
institutions created "common knowledge" about what Athens had decided to do.
This is a technical term in game theory; some fact is common knowledge if all
players know it; all players know that all players know it; all players know
that all players know that all players know it; and so on ad
infinitum. This is a cute notion, which leads to
some clever
mathematics, and is often invoked by classical game theorists as part of
the solution to coordination and cooperation problems. (It also — see
previous link — has remarkably paradoxical consequences, e.g., rational
agents engage in financial speculation, or other forms of gambling, only if the
act of betting is not common knowledge.) But,
as Herbert Gintis says
(Game
Theory Evolving, p. 14), common knowledge is not only "ridiculously
implausible", it is not even needed to solve those problems! Ober actually
quotes this passage from Gintis (on p. 191), but nonetheless uses the concept
of common knowledge a lot. My impression is that most of his
arguments would work fine in terms of mere shared expectations — which,
unlike "common knowledge", might actually have existed.

Ober doesn't just want to say that Athens managed to work without the
dubious benefit of oligarchy. He wants to say that it worked
really well, better than alternatives, and that the reason it did so
was the political, knowledge-aggregating institutions of the democracy. He's
convincing that Athens was one of the most prominent, materially successful and
influential city-states, perhaps the most prominent. (Did this really
need showing?) And he convinces me that the democratic institutions did in
fact work democratically. But he really has nothing that shows these were
causally linked. The closest he comes is putting together some very
rough indices of democratization and prominence, and arguing that democracy was
not a lagging indicator of material flourishing. But these numbers are so
rough (and the time-scale of institutional change so slow) that this doesn't
even rule out democracy being relatively inefficient, a luxury the Athenians
could afford because of their silver mines, their geographic position, and the
self-reinforcing nature of trade patterns, Athens being
the Dubai
of Hellas. The only way I can think of supporting Ober's claims would be
comparisons — classical Athens versus other classical Greek city-states,
and versus Hellenistic Athens*** — which he does not make.

Let me be clear: Ober's book is a remarkable work of scholarship, showing
deep knowledge of the ancient sources, modern classical scholarship, and recent
work on institutional economics. It is also, transparently, motivated by a
real affection for his subject, and for democratic ideals. There is a tension
between these commitments, of course, since the Athenian democracy, like the
rest of ancient Greek society, rested on an endless stream of injustices whose
depth and magnitude are simply horrifying to contemplate. (A report on the
human rights situation in Periclean Attica would give it higher marks than the
modern United
Arab Emirates on transparency and, for a privileged minority, civil
liberties, but vastly worse marks than the UAE on torture, the status of women,
human trafficking, and in general the rights of the large majority of the
population.) Ober admits this, but wants to separate the positive values of
Athenian democracy from the violence inherent in the Athenian social system.
For all my criticisms, Ober persuades me that this separation can be made and
is worth making; that we should learn from Athens. My hunch is that taking
these lessons seriously would lead to radical conclusions****, but that is
another matter for another time. In the meanwhile, I earnestly recommend
Ober's book to everyone interested in democratic theory and collective
cognition.

*: It is very odd that Ober has written a whole book about
Athenian democracy, and the power of democracy in general, ending with the
suggestion that Athens was one of the first instances of a society becoming
"open", and owed its success to that democracy and social openness, which
nowhere so much as mentions Popper's The Open Society and Its
Enemies. Even if Ober thinks the resemblance is completely superficial,
one would expect at least a "please don't confuse me with that famous amateur"
footnote. And I think the resemblance is not superficial at all.

**: We can try to calculate how much information this
intensity of selection can provide about institutions. (The following
calculations are very rough, but should get the right orders of magnitude;
cf. Rivoire and Leibler, 2010.)
Take the high estimate of a 33 percent chance of destruction over 500 years.
This works out to an annual risk of polis death of about 0.2 percent. This is
not nothing, but it's not very much either. If we applied selection like this
to a population starting with a standard Gaussian distribution, removing the
lowest 0.2 percent of the population each year, by the end of 500 years we'd
have increased the mean by about a standard deviation. Said another way, the
entropy rate of selection is about 0.02 bits/year, so, accumulated over the
whole of the archaic and classical periods, we get about 11 bits of information
on which constellation of institutions works best. This is
the maximum amount of information which could be extracted from the
"signal" of city destruction (and yes, that does bring to
mind the one good passage in Thomas Pynchon),
and it would be reduced by correlations over time, etc.
I think that selection is actually vital to the development of institutions.
It's just that the selection which matters is not the rare destruction (or
duplication) of whole polities or societies, but rather the continual choice by
individuals about whether to conform to institutionalized expectations about
their behavior, or to do something else. Renan said that a nation is a daily
plebiscite; in a real sense, this is true of every human institution.
They survive if, and only if, they are continually reproduced in human
practices. This is where selection gets its purchase on
institutions.

***: Was Athens more prominent than less democratic
cities with comparable natural and economic advantages? Presumably yes; how
much of this excess prominence could be explained by chance and
self-reinforcing mechanisms?
(Cf.) Did Athens
become less prominent, compared to other Greek cities, after they all fell
under the domination of the Hellenistic dynasties? If so, this would be
evidence that Athens owed its prominence to some (possibly endogenous) source
other than the excellence of its democratic institutions. (Alternatively,
it could have been brought to prominence by democracy, and then some
other cause took over later, but then would need to say what it was, and
explain why it wasn't working before.)

****: Ober makes some hopeful noises about turning firms or
non-profit organizations into Athenian-style participatory democracies;
apparently he has co-authored a whole business book about
this, A
Company of Citizens. The obvious problem, of course, is that the
employees of a firm are not its citizens, because profits flow to, and
ultimate legal control rests with, the owners, though in practice they
usually delegate to a largely self-perpetuating
management. To draw an Athenian analogy, employees are
metics,
foreigners (or descendants of foreigners) who are allowed to live in the city,
work there, serve in the military, pay taxes, and generally tie their fortunes
to it, but are not even second-class citizens. If a firm wants to fully use
the knowledge and abilities of its workers, and so runs itself as a
participatory democracy, owners and managers would have to actually give up
control. I don't want to assert that the owners must be expropriated
— perhaps they could live on in some ceremonial
or residual role, like constitutional monarchs
in a representative democracy — but clearly we're talking about something
very different from actually existing capitalism.

(With many thanks to Henry Farrell: this draws on some of our unpublished
joint work on the evolution of institutions, and on discussions of this book)